The Art of Love

Written in the sophisticated social world of Augustan Rome, Ovid’s The Art of Love turns the conventions of didactic poetry toward courtship, attraction and relationships. With characteristic wit and irony, Ovid offers advice on where to meet lovers, how to win affection and how to sustain desire, creating a playful guide that also opens a window onto gender, leisure and elite social life in the Roman capital.

This Vintage Classics edition is translated by Tom Payne and also includes Ovid’s companion work The Cure for Love, which reverses the lesson by advising readers how to escape an unwanted passion. Read together, the poems display Ovid’s verbal ingenuity and provocative treatment of love as both art and game. They remain entertaining literary works while offering modern readers a revealing encounter with the assumptions and tensions of Roman society.